A) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a liquid crystal display device, and more particularly to a liquid crystal display device having devised electrode patterns.
B) Description of the Related Art
It is required to improve the visual angle characteristics and transmissivity of a liquid crystal display device.
For a vertical alignment liquid crystal display device of a segment type or a type combining segments and dot matrices, a so-called two-domain alignment control method has been disclosed or proposed by which slit openings are formed through electrodes of the display device to generate oblique electric fields near the slit openings formed through the upper and lower electrodes in a display area, and liquid crystal alignment is controlled by these electric fields to make central molecules in a liquid crystal layer have alignment orientations shifted by 180°. A twisted nematic (TN)-LCD has been disclosed in Japanese Patent No. 3108768, and a vertical alignment LCD has been proposed in JP-A-2004-252298. According to these publications, a longer side of each slit opening is disposed along a right/left direction of the liquid crystal display device. Therefore, two-domain alignment is obtained having different alignment orientations of liquid crystal molecules along an up/down direction of the device, so that visual angle characteristics having good up/down and right/left symmetries can be acquired.
With the method described in the above-described Patent Document, since refractive indices of longer and shorter optical axes of liquid crystal are different, it is difficult to equalize the visual angle characteristics along the up/down and right/left directions. It is also desired to maintain good transmissivity by making alignment uniform as much as possible.